Sympathy

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Pub Date 04 May 2017 | Archive Date 02 Jun 2017

Description

An electrifying novel of blood ties, online identities, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age.


At twenty-three, Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She falls in love with Manhattan, and becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer whose life has strange parallels to her own.


As Alice closes in on Mizuko, her 'internet twin', realities multiply and fact and fiction begin to blur. The relationship between the two women exposes a tangle of lies and sexual encounters. Three families collide as Alice learns that the swiftest answer to an ancient question - where do we come from? - can now be found online.

An electrifying novel of blood ties, online identities, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age.


At twenty-three, Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She falls in love with...


A Note From the Publisher

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Olivia Sudjic was born in London in 1988. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University where she was awarded the E.G. Harwood English Prize and made a Bateman Scholar. She started writing her first novel, Sympathy, in 2014.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Olivia Sudjic was born in London in 1988. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University where she was awarded the E.G. Harwood English Prize and made a Bateman Scholar. She...

Advance Praise

'Filled with explosive intelligence and dark humour, Sympathy is both beautiful and raw, and captures the essence of personal responsibility in the digital age'

Elle, Author to Watch 2017


'The best fictional account I've read of the way the internet has shaped our inner lives. A literary thriller that confirms the arrival of a major new talent'

Observer, Fiction to Look out for in 2017


'A novel examining the interaction of technology and self'

The Lady, Must-reads for 2017


'A tale of obsession and doubling in the digital age'

Bookanista, Spring 2017 Highlights


'The reason to read this novel, aside from the au courant topic, is the luscious, absorbing writing'

Library Journal


'In this unbelievably accomplished first novel, Olivia Sudjic creates a narrator whose compelling voice is timeless, even as her obsessions and the tools she uses to satisfy them are up-to-the-minute modern. At once a riveting mystery and a literary tour de force. Sympathy had me spellbound from the first page to the last'

Emily Gould, author of Friendship


'Olivia Sudjic elegantly explores the warped world of intimacies formed online - and how quickly those intimacies derail. Global in scope, as subtle as it is suspenseful, Sympathy is an extraordinary debut'

Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear


'Getting to know someone has always been a thorny affair. With the addition of personal devices the line between bonding and surveillance has become freakishly blurred. Sympathy is a mind-bending novel that skillfully depicts the bizarre interplay of technology and intimacy with a story that is compassionate, funny, and incredibly alarming'

Claire-Louise Bennet, author of Pond


'An impressive debut. Complex, crisp and highly topical'

Vesna Goldsworthy, author of Gorsky and Chernobyl Strawberries


'A dark, nuanced, fantastical and thrilling debut novel, posing questions of reality vs. fiction and exploring the ways that infatuation causes us to lose ourselves'

Chloe Caldwell, author of Women and I'll Tell You in Person

'Filled with explosive intelligence and dark humour, Sympathy is both beautiful and raw, and captures the essence of personal responsibility in the digital age'

Elle, Author to Watch 2017


'The best...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9780992918293
PRICE £14.99 (GBP)

Average rating from 8 members


Featured Reviews

Sympathy is virtually impossible to describe, I'm struggling to do so even to myself and it was a struggle I grappled with all the way through. In the end Sudjic's own narrator says it best when she characterises her tale as a “love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there.”

Alice Hare has never really known herself. Adopted as a baby she knows little of her birth parents except that her mother is dead and her father in prison. Her adoptive family also offers little stability, her mother telling and retelling, embellishing and rewriting the story of their history so often after her husband disappears that neither mother nor daughter have any real sense what is true. In an attempt to escape what feels like a vortex of uncertainty and parental neediness Alice relocates to New York and the home of her cancer-stricken grandmother Silvia.

As Alice attempts to find her way and herself in a new city and a new life, her perceptions and expectations constantly shaped by the "lives" she observes online she stumbles across Mizuko Himura, a Japanese heiress, freelance writer and constant user of social media. Alice becomes obsessed with the connections and parallels she comes to see between her history and Mizuko's. Parallels that take on increasingly irrational significance until she manages to engineer an entry into Mizuko's real life. This is stalking in the internet age and it is not pretty as Alice becomes increasingly obsessed, harnessing all the knowledge she has amassed online into manipulating Mizuko into friendship by aping her like, her opinions and playing to her character. Alice in an extremely complex and unsettling character, incredibly self-involved and yet almost entirely lacking in self-awareness and despite her disturbing penchant for manipulation she is almost endearingly naive to the fact that Mizuko's consciously-curated online identity is no more genuine than her own.

Despite Alice's flaws, her obsessive and possessive tendencies, her selfishness, her guile it is testament to Sudjic's talent that she somehow forces a little sympathy, unpicking these unpleasant characteristics in a way that reveals the sad fragility and vulnerability that underpin her neuroses.

The narrative structure is really quite mindbogglingly clever. Alice's fragmentary, disjointed and unreliable reminiscences deliberately invoking those long, convoluted "rabbit-holes" (her name is no accident) with which anyone who has ever accidentally lost hours of their life to the internet will be disturbingly familiar. We follow Alice through many, often fascinating, digressions, from particle physics to the 2011 Japanese tsunami to the disappearance of flight MH370. These labyrinthine tangents draw us in an out of the main narrative forging unexpected connections and consequences that make Alice's bizarre focus on coincidences seem less and less absurd. Because Sympathy is all about our lives online and how the constant presence of undiluted, unsubstantiated data can potentially affect and warp our opinions, our thinking and our identities, you find yourself becoming just a little Alice.

Sympathy is an impressive, immersive and ultimately addictive experience, disorientating and irresistible and Olivia Sudjic is, without a doubt, a young author to watch.

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An intriguing story about obsession and stalking in the virtual world of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Alice is fascinated by the beautiful, half Japanese Mizuko who she first sees in 'multiple miniatures' on the internet. Travelling from the UK to New York she tracks her down and engineers a relationship with her which starts as friendship; but Alice wants to be her lover. Everything goes wrong as 'the solid world around me, the reality of it, [was] starting to slide away, like wet sand sinking beneath the water.' As Alice is caught in a web of her own making, she loses friends, family and a boyfriend. After a drug-fuelled gang rape she spirals into a breakdown. This mesmerising story holds a mirror up to our contemporary world and questions our reliance on 'the life-starting-over sound' of our mobiles and all the rest of our fascination with 'virtual reality.' A little too long but worth the read.

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